Three Friends, Three Apartments, One SoHo Building

What do you do when you’re too grown up and successful to have roommates? If you’re as tight with your friends as Chris James, Scott London and Reed Zaroff are, you do the next best thing: Create a little complex of adjoining apartments in the same building.

The three men, who met through mutual friends, share an interest in music, art and cooking. They were already more or less inseparable during their time off, spending weekends in Miami, skiing in Aspen, going on European getaways, taking annual trips to New Orleans and camping at Burning Man in Nevada. Sometimes Mr. London’s girlfriend, Wendy Herrera, would join them, and they would joke that she had three boyfriends.

“You could pretty much say we don’t travel without each other,” said Mr. Zaroff, 41, a veterinarian who also co-owns a contracting company called Habiterra.

So several years ago, when they were all looking for places to buy, “Scott had this idea that we should build a community and find a space where we could have apartments together,” said Mr. James, 39, a senior managing director at the investment firm the Blackstone Group.

“It’s not that we wanted to set up a dorm,” added Mr. London, 49, an art collector and former partner of the fashion brand Baby Phat. It’s simply that “we never break ranks.”

Luck was on their side, as a trio of apartments in a co-op building on Lafayette Street in SoHo serendipitously opened up around the same time. Mr. Zaroff bought his 1,900-square-foot unit first, in January 2013, for $2.65 million. Mr. London purchased a 2,100-square-foot unit on the floor above a few months later, for $3.1 million. And that summer, Mr. James bought the 1,700-square-foot unit directly below Mr. London’s apartment, for $2.7 million.

To renovate their apartments, all three used Mr. Zaroff’s general contracting company and the design studio Gachot, whose work on a friend’s home and the NoHo restaurant Acme had impressed them.

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A doorway hidden behind a pivoting bookcase in Mr. London's apartment leads to a staircase that provides access to Mr. James’s apartment.CreditBrittany Ambridge

“These guys had discovered that design was a way of amplifying your lifestyle,” said John Gachot, who runs the firm with his wife, Christine Gachot. “Our challenge was to create three different apartments for three different guys, without pulling the same trick twice.”

That approach resulted in apartments that reflect each owner’s individual preferences, for a cost of about $1.25 million each.

Mr. London’s home, which was finished about a year ago, is the quintessential SoHo loft, with exposed wooden columns and beams, raw brick and a large art collection illuminated by skylights. Mr. James’s apartment, completed last March, is more tailored, with white oak cabinetry and brass accents, bedroom walls covered in artist’s canvas, midcentury modern furniture and — to ensure that it’s “the ultimate bachelor pad,” Ms. Gachot said — a ceiling-mounted swing. Mr. Zaroff’s home, completed last month, has an industrial edge, with polished concrete floors, a charcoal-and-white palette and 1970s furniture.

The Gachots’ final touch was turning a rarely used back staircase into what amounts to a secret passage between two of the apartments, terminating on one end in a concealed door behind Mr. London’s bookcases and on the other in a panel in Mr. James’s fabric wall.

That makes it “easy to pop by,” Mr. James said. “Those ‘Seinfeld’ episodes where people just begin to hang out in each other’s apartments — that actually happens fairly often.”

Yet life is full of unforeseen twists and turns. During construction, Mr. London and Ms. Herrera, who are now engaged, discovered they were going to be parents. “We had to pivot and change the spare bedroom into a nursery,” Mr. London said, before their son, Bryce, was born last May.

The new parents are now realizing that their micro-community is even more beneficial than they ever imagined.

“We can go watch a movie and leave the kid with one of these guys,” Mr. London said. “It’s that whole thing about ‘it takes a village.’ ”

But maybe a slightly larger one.

“We’re waiting for a fourth apartment to open up,” Mr. Zaroff said, “so we can build a rec room and common area to share.”